Not Very Good

It’s quite commonly accepted that being able to use a computer is an important part of many professional jobs these days, including being a teacher at a modern school.

It’s certainly important at our school.

So when you walk in to your first day’s IT induction and declare “I’m not very good with computers,” you’re basically walking in on your first day and proclaiming to your new employer “I’m not very good at an important part of the job you’ve hired me for.”

8 responses to “Not Very Good”

It wouldn’t be acceptable for a teacher to have poor literacy skills, nor indeed have I ever heard one admit it (despite occasional evidence to the contrary). A few seem to think it’s acceptable to admit to poor numeracy … though lord knows why, given the prominence that data occupy in today’s schools. But you’re right; the number who almost take pride in their incompetency beggars belief!
We wouldn’t employ a candidate who clearly had poor literacy so why is it acceptable to employ anyone with poor digital literacy?

I’ve often thought I should be on the interviewing panel for candidates; a wheat and chaff sort of thing. It could save an awful lot of interviewing time. I wonder what the ‘discriminators’ would be? I’d start with “Right Mr/s X, I’d like you to connect this laptop to the projector …

Some people seem to wear “not good with numbers” like a badge of honour, and it seems society allows IT to fall into that bracket too. “Oooh, look at me, I’m so daft I don’t really understand this”. Gives me the pip, it does.

It’d be so tempting to go a bit Charlie Brooker – “Oh, well that’s OK – I’m not very good at talking politely to complete cu[beep]”… Tempting in a P45 kind of way.

A slight offshoot of the original topic here :)

I’d like to get some “Not really that good with IT” badges made up, and hand them out to some of the now-completely-obviously-good-at-lying-on-application-form-cretins we interviewed recently for a couple of ICTTechnician posts we had advertised.

Never was the phrase “previous applicants need not apply” more richly deserving of the bold and underlined font used when it came to re-advertising the posts.

Believe it or not we actually did have a basic IT test as part of the interview for for teaching assistant roles at my last school. Nothing for the teachers themselves though, which is presumably how we’d ended up with this muppet.

Ah yes that one my best one was doing IT Induction for an NQT and she was fresh from uni and not a later to life teacher. We explained log off / lock workstation before leaving it never walk away etc… she was yep understood importance etc…. what did she do at the end of the session…. yep just got up picked her handbag and phone up and walked off with the other NQT that was her best buddy! They were called back and asked to fix the issue and they were oh sorry you want to come to the pub as well…. She soon learnt quickly of her mistake :)